Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic introduces "Neuro the Clown," a clown who uses neuroscience terminology instead of traditional clown tricks. When someone points out he doesn't look like a clown, Neuro explains that the combination of fear and happiness aroused by a normal clown can be replicated through direct neural stimulation -- essentially arguing he can bypass the clown costume and go straight to manipulating the brain.

He tells the audience to "line up single file to receive grudging amusement," and when asked if he can do illusions, he responds with "Consciousness!" The final punchline is a deep philosophical joke: the suggestion that consciousness itself is the greatest illusion, a nod to various philosophical and neuroscientific arguments that our subjective experience of consciousness may be a kind of elaborate trick the brain plays on itself. The comic merges clown humor with philosophy of mind in a characteristically SMBC fashion.